The New Middle East (28 page)

The Israeli government and the IDF considered the reporting of much of the conflict by the Western media unfair because it focused so much on the civilian deaths in Gaza. Israel rightly pointed out, as I reported at the time, that Hamas was firing rockets from central residential areas and that those rockets were being deliberately fired at Israeli civilians. Human Rights Watch called that a violation of the laws of war.
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The problem for Israel is that it’s not a level playing field when it comes to civilian deaths. Most Western governments consider Hamas to be a terrorist organisation exactly because it kills civilians. Israel is a democratic state, and when it ends up killing, as it did in Gaza, lots of children, it is held to a very different standard. The UN Human Rights Council report that said the IDF was not responsible for killing Omar Misharawi went on to say of the final death toll of 168 Palestinians ‘killed by Israeli military action ... 101 are believed to be civilians, including 33 children and 13 women.’
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The way the war is reported also plays into the regional dynamic and the sense among people from the Arab world of a Western double standard towards the conflict. There is a disconnect between how the West and the Arab world view the same events. Arab audiences on their TV screens during the Gaza war saw in all their gruesome detail the images of every child killed by Israeli bombs. They cannot understand how Westerners can look at those images and not be moved. What they do not understand is that different cultural sensitivities mean Western audiences do not look at those images, because they are considered too gory for broadcast. The news bulletins about the same stories may contain similar facts in the Arab and Western world, but they carry entirely different images. In the West the belief is that if viewers are confronted with graphic scenes of violence they will literally switch off and so will not learn about what has happened at all. So in the Gaza war and also in other conflicts like Syria and previously in Iraq, the true horror of what has just happened to civilians on the ground is rarely explicitly conveyed to audiences in the Western world. To audiences in the Arab world it always is.

Instead, the blame game in the West is often played around the level of violence as described by the statistics. So the numbers and the words to describe them become key. Lobby groups on both sides focus on things like whether reports say people ‘died’ or were ‘killed’, whether ‘people were bombed’ or ‘targets hit’.

The last Gaza war was an important milestone in the conflict, and not just because it was the first battle fought after the sea change in the Arab world. During the war Hamas proved for the first time that it had rockets that could hit Israel’s biggest cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Suddenly more than half the country’s population had cause to feel vulnerable to attack again. Among the Arab public the scale of civilian deaths caused outrage. Unlike the previous conflicts, this time their opinions actually mattered to their leadership, because they had been elected by them.

The two main campaign issues of recent years regarding the Palestinian cause have been the illegal Jewish settlements and the situation in Gaza. The first made the secular Fatah look ineffectual. The second made Hamas in Gaza look like the only serious players in the struggle with the Israelis.

The last war again increased the strength of Hamas and so weakened the Palestinian Authority’s leaders. That produced a sense of panic in the international community, because it coincided with a very public shift to the right in Israeli politics after the ruling Likud dumped many of its liberals. The Europeans were suddenly alarmed by polls that said Israel was likely to vote in a more right-wing government than it actually did – one that didn’t want to talk to the Palestinians no matter how moderate they were. It raised the prospect of Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority being consigned to the scrapyard as a legitimate vehicle for the aspirations of their people. Something had to be done, and this time something was, by the European states at least.

On 29 November 2012, exactly sixty-five years to the day after the United Nations decided to divide British Mandate Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian state, another landmark event took place at the UN. The member countries voted overwhelmingly to upgrade the Palestinians’ status from an observer entity, represented by the PLO after the 1993 Oslo accords, to a ‘non-member observer state’ like the Vatican. Only one European nation, the Czechs, opposed it. The word ‘state’ had moved into the international lexicon, though it still did not mean that a Palestinian state had been internationally recognised. But it was a word that mattered. Israel was isolated during the vote from all but its allies in North America. As important as the vote was the fact that it showed that the Obama regime could now not bend either the Israelis or the Palestinians to its will.

Two months after the vote the Palestinian leadership decided to celebrate with some new stationery bearing the legend ‘State of Palestine’. They also had a new placard made up saying the same thing for their first appearance of the New Year 2013 at the United Nations. The US’s UN ambassador, Susan Rice, immediately objected to it. The PA left important documents like ID cards alone. ‘At the end of the day, the Palestinian Authority won’t cause trouble for its people,’ said one of President Abbas’s spokesmen, which underlined the point made by the US State Department, which declared dismissively: ‘You can’t create a state by rhetoric and with labels and names.’
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No one is bothering to dress up the battered remains of the two-state solution, which seems more and more likely to dissolve into a one-state reality. That suits the Jewish right, which wants to formally annex the whole of the West Bank. That would leave the state of Israel with a choice. It cannot be Jewish, control all that land and be democratic. The demographics of absorbing that many Palestinians mean that a greater Israel can only have two out of those three things, though the Israeli right has some vague notion that it could keep the Palestinian land but not the 2.65 million Palestinian people who live on it.
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The ‘One-state’ solution also increasingly suits the Palestinian left, who view it as an opportunity to launch a version of the Anti-Apartheid campaign that worked so successfully against South Africa.

But the man who first coined the phrase ‘land for peace’ for a speech he wrote in the 1980s for the then secretary of state George Shultz told me there just cannot be any alternative to the two-state solution. ‘For seventy-five years since the Peel commission everybody knows that there has got to be partition,’ said Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer.

The only people that seem to believe there is an alternative are nut cases like Dani Dayan [the former leader of Israel’s Settler movement], who writes in the
New York Times
that everything’s fine, everything’s just dandy, but it’s not, and there is no right-minded Israeli who would agree with a one-state solution even if they didn’t know that the Palestinian intention is to do an apartheid campaign. The alternative of trying to swallow the Palestinian population just doesn’t work, so if you want to plan for a short lifespan for the state of Israel you can try to live that way and at some point the thing just implodes. And if the right wing thinks it can rely upon the Haredi multiplication table [the high birthrate among ultra-Orthodox Jews], well, this is a large segment of that society that doesn’t support the state anyway. So you know it’s a fool’s paradise to think otherwise.

The growing shift in Europe, as illustrated by the UN vote, was not something that the Israeli leadership had been blind to. It just didn’t care very much. Israeli officials told me privately that those around Binyamin Netanyahu recognised this change but that it was impossible to persuade Netanyahu that it mattered. He’d put all his eggs in the American basket because he believed he could contrive the support of the American public, even if it meant going over the head of the American president. This view was shared by the right-wingers in his cabinet. A minister in the present Israeli cabinet put it to me once like this: ‘I know the American people support us but I’m not sure about the White House. In Europe I know the leaders support us, I’m not sure about the people.’

During the Gaza conflict both the American people and the American government did support Israel. It worked to get a ceasefire between the two sides, but made it clear it fully supported Israel’s actions during the fighting. The go-to man for President Obama to get that ceasefire was President Mohamed Morsi, who was reluctantly praised even by the Israelis. The agreement was described to me by a senior Israeli military figure as ‘a strategic compromise we can live with’. That deal entailed the Israelis promising not to assassinate Hamas leaders and having to further relax their blockade. Most of Gaza’s population is crammed into the urban strip, but there are larger open areas around it. Under the deal, land closer to the separation barrier was allowed to be farmed. Gazans also got more fishing rights, and more construction material was allowed in. Once again the violent resistance from Islamist groups in Gaza won new concessions from the Israelis while the attempts to negotiate by the moderate Palestinians in the West Bank did not.

In 1997 Binyamin Netanyahu sent Mossad agents to try to assassinate the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in neighbouring Jordan with a complex plot involving a rare poison. Meshaal then had to spend the years that followed hiding in Syria. But after the 2012 Gaza war Netanyahu had to sit back and watch Meshaal end his decades in exile with a very public and triumphant visit to the Strip for the first time ever. A few months later Meshaal, who is now based in Qatar, was re-elected by the leadership for another four-year term.

President Morsi, like the broad mass of the Muslim Brotherhood, was not willing to accept the status quo. He made that clear during the 2012 Gaza conflict and he has done so since, but when he spoke about the ceasefire negotiations he revealed that the Brotherhood’s pragmatism at home will also be applied to its dealings abroad. ‘President Obama has been very helpful, very helpful,’ he declared. ‘We are not against individuals or countries or states, we want to live in peace with others, but real peace, comprehensive peace.’
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But Morsi’s unvarnished views were uncovered by a pro-Israeli press-monitoring group the following year when it released comments the president made about the previous Gaza conflict, before the Arab Spring catapulted the Muslim Brotherhood into power. In an excerpt from an interview given in 2010 he described Zionists as ‘these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs’.
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The Axis of Resistance, the previous champion of armed Palestinian groups, which contained Syria, Hezbollah, Iran and Hamas, is in the process of being smashed. The Assad regime will not be around to support the cause, and the mask slipped anyway with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camp in Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus in December 2012. That left dozens of Palestinians killed or injured. When I tried to visit the camp two months later it was still sealed off by Syrian security forces.

Hezbollah, by sticking with Syria, has undermined its credentials with huge swathes of the Arab world. Hezbollah is a creation of Iran, so while Tehran supports Syria it will too. But Iran, the fulcrum of it all, is in economic meltdown because it is under a form of international siege. It is also facing a resurgence of Sunni forces in the region and the threat of a military attack from the strongest nation on earth.

Hamas is now much more beholden to Egypt, Turkey and Qatar, but its leadership believes the Arab Spring has permanently shifted regional support in its favour, because it, not the PLO, shares the same broad ideology as these regional powers. ‘These have not been revolutions, they have been an Islamic awakening,’ Mahmoud al-Zahar told me. ‘Look who took power after elections in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Libya and even in Morocco, without a revolution. It will take a decade, but then you will see a very big change in the geopolitical status. The Islamic countries will unite and will cooperate and will not be tools for the West or the East, they are going to represent themselves.’

The Israelis and the Egyptian leadership may hate each other, but that does not mean they cannot find ways to work together. This will continue to take place through military channels with the private acquiescence of the politicians on each side, who will continue to snipe at each other in public.

Israel is more worried about militancy in the Sinai than it is about militancy in Gaza. Hamas now has the responsibilities of government. It is not single-mindedly preoccupied with attacking Israel any more. But Sinai does concern Israel, and it needs Egyptian cooperation to deal with the growing militancy there. Egypt is worried about losing control of Sinai too. The Sinai has always been the transit point for Iranian weapons to Gaza, which were flown to Sudan then smuggled up through Sinai to the Strip. The revolt in Libya has produced a flood of weapons, looted from Gaddafi’s military, onto the black market. Many of those weapons ended up in Syria and North Africa but Israel knows a lot also ended up in the hands of militants in the Sinai who live in an area that is mountainous and difficult to control. A consequence of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was that the Sinai was largely demilitarised. During Mubarak’s rule nothing was done to build up the peninsula’s infrastructure and economy, so drugs and gunrunning became the most lucrative enterprise. Egypt too does not want Gaza becoming a safe haven for Sinai militants. It does not want the tunnels being used as their conduit. It warned Hamas of that when in February 2013, even after the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, the Egyptians flooded some of the tunnels with sewage.